Meet us at PyCon!

In the open source world, reddit is a bit unique. Our code is out there for anyone to use, yet the biggest benefit most contributors get isn’t running their own copy for themselves, but seeing their changes live on reddit.com. We know the reddit code isn’t well documented or easy to traverse, and that makes it all the more amazing for us to see the number of fantastic pull requests coming in every month — by commit count, roughly 6.6% of reddit code is from open source contributors (and that’s not counting the 21 open pull requests that we’re behind on reviewing).

Special thanks to bboe and buddydvd for their work on the API layer! And a big “white hat” thanks to rolmos for responsibly disclosing a banned subreddit permissions issue.

To PyCon!

But where would reddit be without Python? I’m pleased to announce that reddit will be hosting a sprint at PyCon 2012. We’d be remiss to forget that reddit is about more than just the server side code. There’s a budding community of applications, scripts, and friendly bots taking advantage of the reddit API, and we’d love to see more of that.

How do PyCon sprints work? They’re basically hack-a-thons with perhaps a bit more direction than usual. Sprints are about tackling one or more specific problems in a project. The reddit API, like the reddit code, could use a bit of work, so that’s part of the focus of the sprint. But since that may not be interesting to everyone, we’d also like to welcome anyone wanting to work on an API client to participate in the sprint.

During the sprint, chromakode, spladug and I will be on hand to answer questions about the code, API, and almost anything else you’d like to discuss. For more information and to officially sign up, see the PyCon sprints page. If you don’t have time for our sprint (or won’t be around for them), keep an eye out for reddit-shirted-admins at PyCon itself — we’ll be around for the main conference events, as well.

PyCon sprints run from Monday, March 12th through Thursday, March 15th (oh, and PyCon’s in Santa Clara, CA this year). They’re free-form by nature with no strict schedule; expect us to be available from around 10 AM to around dinner-time. Be sure to come by for the pre-sprint intro sessions on Sunday evening if you’re planning on joining us!